The American Wood Protection Association publishes the standards that determine how wood is treated in every house, deck and marine structure built across North America. Its membership consists of manufacturers, contractors, builders and field inspectors who need answers on site and depend on standards being instantly findable. On the small and highly responsive AWPA team falls a huge responsibility: making standards and technical literature available, updated and delivered in a timely manner.
Their challenge is universal: How do you transform a legacy library into a modern, revenue-driving digital product that enhances the user experience and protects IP without draining internal operational resources?
Change or not change?
The AWPA has had digital subscription platforms. They worked, in the way that old tools work: technically functional, quietly frustrating. Search was cumbersome. Navigation felt labored. For professionals in the field who needed to locate a specific standard mid-inspection, those extra steps created real friction and drag on productivity.
For the team, the existing solution was not making their work easier either. Every update cycle brought a constellation of small, repetitive tasks that had to be processed manually to keep the library consistent and current, time that any team could not afford to lose.
The search for a better solution was already on the roadmap, grounded in the understanding that the current experience was costing the organization something difficult to measure but impossible to ignore: member engagement, digital adoption and trust in the product itself. Deadline: one year.
A platform built for how people actually work
Get More Brain’s solution moved the evaluation forward by a full year. The demo answered the core question immediately: not by listing capabilities, but by demonstrating a genuine understanding of how professionals in this industry actually use a standards reference. Out in the field. Under time pressure. Often with one hand on a device and the other on the job.
The high-value library needed to be transformed. Migrating a 700-page technical document is not a matter of uploading a file.
It meant rebuilding the entire structure:
- Intelligent Cross-Referencing: Automating links between related standards so users can follow regulatory threads instantly.
- Dynamic Structural Integrity: The digitization process caught formatting anomalies that print had missed, delivering an unexpected accuracy boost right at ingestion.
- Rapid Time-to-Market: The platform launched ahead of schedule, yielding immediate, measurable member satisfaction.
The goal was a document that behaved less like a book and more like a tool.
«The members that have had a chance to go in and use it regularly have been emailing me telling me how good it looks, how easy it is, how intuitive it is to use.»
Nicole Butler, Executive Vice President at AWPA
What the platform actually delivers
For SDO directors focused on revenue and retention, user experience is a commercial strategy. If a digital product is difficult to navigate, adoption plummets, and subscriptions risk cancellation.
Search For a 700-page technical reference used under pressure search capability is not a feature. It is the feature. The platform offers three levels of search: across the entire library, within individual documents, and through an AI-powered chat interface. So, when a member needs a broad overview or a specific clause, the answer surfaces in seconds, identified quickly.
«Your search function is phenomenal. People need very easily very specific references and using the one search box, you type in what you need, and it comes up immediately.»
Nicole Butler, Executive Vice President at AWPA
Accessibility was designed around the realities of fieldwork. The platform is fully mobile-responsive, reformatting automatically to any screen so that an inspector on an iPad gets the same experience as someone at a desk.
Offline usage was included. For sites with no connectivity, chapter-by-chapter download makes the most critical content available offline.
IP Protection enhanced. SDO’s often worry about intellectual property theft when moving to digital delivery. Content is streamed rather than stored locally, protecting the intellectual property of the library without limiting how members can use it.
Personalization enabled. Individual members can personalize their experience with different tools that turn a shared reference into a working document tailored to how each person thinks.
Standards are color-coded to distinguish normative requirements from advisory guidance, so the weight of a given clause is visible at a glance. Internal cross-referencing connects related standards directly, with access controls that respect subscription boundaries.
Alongside search, the visual clarity of the platform made an impression. An interface that feels modern and easy to navigate is not a cosmetic concern, it is what keeps members on the platform long enough to find value in it, and what turns individual users into advocates who recommend it to peers. Features like inline commenting and group sharing, once members discover them, add a layer of collaboration that a physical book simply cannot offer. Standards that were once consulted in isolation can now be discussed, annotated and shared within teams, changing how the knowledge actually moves through an organization.
«The way it [the GMB platform]is laid out, the way everything looks on the screen is incredibly easy for people to use. And I don’t think you can stress enough how important that is.For example, you go to a website just as an everyday person and you’re having difficulty navigating that website or you can’t read their articles or you can’t get where you want to go, you’re going to click off. You’re going to go to something else.»
Nicole Butler, Executive Vice President at AWPA
Analytics turned in Business Analytics
One of the greatest values for SDO executives lies in the platform’s granular analytics. AWPA has now a platform that tracks engagement down to the paragraph level, showing leadership exactly which standards are being accessed, by whom, and for how long. That kind of visibility transforms a publishing operation into an intelligence tool that can inform how standards are written, prioritized and promoted in future cycles. Allowing sales, operations, and committee leaders to make data-driven decisions about future standard development, pricing tiers, and promotional strategies.
Transforming the hidden cost into a growing path
Each year, the AWPA directed a huge effort to ensure all standards updated for library usage. This process took a significant amount of time and resources. Now his time can be redirected towards other priorities. The GMB solution supports the entire organization to better serve its members and to assist the team.
